Eamon Scanlon (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am very concerned about the potential implications of restructuring the Money Advice and Budgeting Service and the Citizens Information service from local companies into a regional model. I am particularly concerned about the lack of dialogue and clarity surrounding the restructuring process.

It reminds me of community welfare officers who were taken out of the local community where a service was being provided locally to people. Some of my constituents have to make a 50 mile round trip to meet a community welfare officer. These people are single parents, young mothers looking after young children. A taxi for their journey could cost €50. That is not what the community welfare officer is about. I see similarities with these proposals.

There are 51 MABS companies and 42 Citizens Information services. They are managed at county level by voluntary boards of directors with strong links to the communities that they serve. People confide daily in the CIS and MABS and put their faith in the independence of the services throughout the country. They visit with queries about their rights as employees, as tenants, as social welfare recipients, as carers or as people with disabilities. These services provide a vital lifeline for many who find themselves unemployed, in mortgage arrears or overwhelmed by debt. There is not a Member of this House who has not met a constituent who had difficulties with debt and got a good service from MABS.

The CIS and MABS are two of the few services where people are welcome to talk face to face with a representative. Other services and organisations are distancing themselves from the people they serve. An example of this is last week's announcement from Ulster Bank that it is to close 22 branches in this country. This is disenfranchising members of our community who are not Internet-savvy and people with literacy problems where there is no one available to help with filling out forms.

Dismantling this county-by-county governance system to move services into eight regions would be wrong. It would be a retrograde step. Rural Ireland has already had many services taken into large urban centres. That is very wrong. The proposed model to regionalise services is not an appropriate one. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current structure, although improvements can always be achieved through open and honest dialogue. The restructuring process will change the service from a bottom-up service to a top-down one. It will lose the local nature of the service and the experience of the local boards. The most urgent need in services is staffing, not governance.

We call on the Minister for Social Protection to immediately issue a directive to abandon these proposals. These vital services must be maintained in the community. They must not become victims of regionalisation and an additional cost to the taxpayer.

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